For those who were looking forward to seeing G.I. Joe: Retaliation, it looks like you'll be waiting a lot longer. The summer sequel, directed by Jon M. Chu, has been uprooted from its June 29 release date and pushed all the way back to March 29, 2013: Paramount Bumps 'G.I. Joe: Retaliation' to 2013.
Damn. The movie was scheduled to open next month! It'll be a little while before you get to see the ab-tastic Lee Byung-hun again. Does that mean that Paramount doesn't have confidence in the movie? Studio sources say they're moving it back to convert the movie to 3D, and do it right. It's business:
Paramount sources say that for the studio to recoup its sizable investment -- it financed 50 percent of the sequel, while MGM put up 25 percent and David Ellison's Skydance Productions is backing 25 percent -- a 3D conversion needs to happen, and it wants to make sure the conversion is done right. The studio is pointing to the recent 3D version of James Cameron's Titanic as a success story.As an old school G.I. Joe fan, I was looking forward to seeing this movie next month. The first one was really awful, but everything I'd seen and heard about Retaliation was kind of promising. I'm still interested in seeing how Jon Chu handles big blockbuster action scenes and ninja asskicking stuff.
Still, the movie is based on a Hasbro toy line, and some might blame the shift on the disappointing box office of Universal's Battleship, the adaptation of the Hasbro board game that opened to just $25.5 million domestic last weekend. Paramount's first installment of the franchise, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, grossed $300 million worldwide in 2009. But the high cost of studio tentpole movies now requires big-budget releases to gross more than that.
Then again, maybe the director behind two Step Up movies and The LXD is using the next ten months to secretly insert a few musical numbers into G.I. Joe: Retaliation. Oh, you didn't know that Snake Eyes was a b-boy?